The Icarus Show Read online

  Alan Tydman’s face was a picture. He couldn’t believe Alex Stay-in-Bed-ows had overslept again. As the bus pulled away from the stop and poor old Bed-ows came running up, he made special needs gestures out of the window.

  I didn’t go back home this time. When the school bus had disappeared from sight, I crossed the road to the opposite stop and waited for the B17 in the other direction. My plan would make me seriously late for school, but that didn’t matter. When the B17 arrived, I got on and was carried into town.

  The first thing I saw in the Laurels parking lot was the big banana car that had been parked outside ours yesterday. It seemed a good sign. See, it seemed to be saying, you’re right! The world is full of surprises. You’re right to believe in incredible things.

  I didn’t waste time calling in at reception. That would be stupid. I went straight round to Maisie’s French windows. She could let me in through just as before.

  But when I peered into her room, I saw she had a visitor already. The two of them sat talking, with their chairs pulled together and their heads bent close.

  And I saw who the visitor was. All the way from Wonderland, he’d come. He’d come to her and saved her the trouble of having to go to him.

  It was Don.

  I was starting to tiptoe away when he looked up. I’d not meant to disturb them. But now he was moving toward the window, beckoning me in. I wondered if the difficult fastening would magically yield to his touch, but it didn’t. He had to thump it—hard—with his fist, to make it budge. And then, when it did, and the window opened, he called, “Don’t go! You’re Alex, aren’t you?” and it wasn’t Don’s voice, but the voice of a much younger man. His face was very like Don’s but, again—yes—younger, and so was his body: younger than Don’s, I saw that now, not bent and stiff.

  “Donald!” called Maisie from inside the room. “Will he come? Tell him not to be silly!”

  “Ma says don’t be silly,” he said, and gave me a smile. I didn’t smile back but I followed him in.

  He’d just arrived from Australia, he said, once he’d found me a chair and Maisie had given me a cookie. His body clock was all over the place: He kept waking up in the middle of the night.

  “Yesterday I was coming to see Ma—I was really excited”—Maisie tutted, but I saw she was pleased—“when I suddenly realized it was eight in the morning. So I stopped off—”

  “At our house,” I filled in.

  “Yes. The lights were on and the curtains were open. I thought it would be okay. You’d just left for school, your mum said, and your dad had already gone to work.”

  “I think I saw your car,” I said, “as the school bus went past.”

  He laughed. “I bet you did. Great big monstrosity of a thing: No one could miss it! All they had left in the rental place when I went.”

  “Your mum made my boy a nice cup of tea—”

  It was funny, Maisie calling him a boy.

  “—and you’ll never guess where he drank it!”

  I will, I thought.

  “In Don’s shed!”

  Donald smiled. “Not that your mum didn’t ask me to sit in the kitchen—I like the new color, by the way—I just had a sudden real urge to see the old shed. When I was your age, I used to spend more time in there than I did in the house! Used to smoke down there, where Dad and Ma wouldn’t see.”

  “Oh, hush!” said Maisie. “Don’t go giving Alex ideas. You’ve more sense than to smoke, haven’t you, Alex? A deal more sense than this great booby! And if you think”—she turned to the booby—“if you think we didn’t see … Well! The smoke used to pour out through all the gaps in the brickwork. You couldn’t have signaled more clearly if you’d tried! Don and I used to stand at the kitchen window, laughing!”

  Donald must have heard the story before, because he didn’t seem surprised. He just said, “Anyway, I enjoyed sitting down in the old place again.”

  “It’s very untidy, he says,” said Maisie severely, frowning at me.

  “Ma! I said it’s very like Dad had it!”

  “Same difference,” said Maisie.

  “Well, anyway,” said Donald. “It is. Very like. A bit more mortar gone, that’s all. I suppose the mason bees have been at it again—one or two always used to move in in the summer. Sometimes you could actually hear them, chomping away, when the weather was warm. If Dad were alive … but there, everyone has their own ideas and your mum’s might seem drastic but I have to admit … ”

  At this point, Maisie had a sudden coughing fit. I fetched her a glass of water while Donald thumped her back. He was really quite rough. But then, she was quite rough with him—in what she said—like calling him a booby. It’s funny, how roughness and rudeness can mean you don’t care for someone, but also the opposite. I suddenly realized that Donald was talking about Don being dead and it was okay, Maisie wasn’t crying. Perhaps it was better that Donald was Donald, after all, not Don-in-a-parallel-world. Perhaps if Maisie had Donald, she could let Don go.

  “Um, Donald, how long are you staying?” I asked. “How long till you have to go back to Australia?”

  “Don’t know,” said Donald, and Maisie looked away.

  There’d been something wrong with the conversation I’d had with Maisie and Donald—not the whole of it, just the bit toward the end. It was Maisie’s coughing fit. It bothered me—not because I was worried for her health (I’d stopped worrying about that), but because it had seemed unnatural somehow. Almost put on. Maisie may have been clever, but she wasn’t a good actor, and that’s what her interruption felt like: an act.

  But why? What had we been talking about? I couldn’t remember. What had Donald been saying? Why should Maisie have wanted to shut him up like that? She could have just come straight out with it: She did with everything else! The whole thing made me uneasy, and yet I couldn’t work it out.

  At school, the big thing was Icarus. Nobody said anything, but Alan was still out to do someone in. I was Bed-ows now. Alex Bed-ows. And I didn’t mind, not really. I’d always imagined that once you’d reacted, once everyone looked at you—gave you a name—they’d never stop looking. But they did. I suppose they got bored. Once I’d been labeled—the boy who couldn’t get up in the morning—I could miss the bus as often as I liked. In a way, it was my Act Normal rule all over again: I wasn’t acting normal for a normal person, but perfectly normal for Alex Stay-in-Bed-ows. As long as I wasn’t linked with Bogsy—who was weird—it was okay.

  We did have one thing in common, though, Bogsy and me. We both had this strange kind of freedom to go about our business unnoticed. How did Bogsy manage to get his notes and feathers in everyone’s bags? Nobody saw because nobody looked. He was like the invisible man. (I made a point of not looking, these days, so as not to arouse his suspicions.) Bogsy’s business was Icarus: setting the problem, conducting the teaser campaign. Mine was Icarus, too. Solving the problem, working everything out. Maisie’s idea of telling a teacher was mad: I could do this myself.

  I went to the shed again—Bogsy’s, I mean—once Bogsy was safely on the bus.

  It was still an awful mess. I twisted my ankle, treading on something buried under the rubbish: the electrical plug to that big chest freezer they kept in there. Its prongs were sticking up and I couldn’t help crying out in pain. Trust Bogsy to leave such a hazard lying around.

  His sheet of math homework had gone. In its place was a pile of familiar-looking slips of paper.

  I counted them: twenty-eight. He was only doing our homeroom, then: Not the whole year, not the whole school.

  And the message? Twenty-eight times over, I read one word: “Sunset.”

  There was something spooky about it. I didn’t want to be there anymore. It was only luck that I didn’t step on the freezer plug again as I scrambled out. And I only just managed to make myself pause to shut the door behind me, before I ran.

  The sunset notes weren’t delivered that day. How could they be? Bogsy had left them behind when he went to school
. Perhaps he’d just forgotten them, like he’d forgotten that sheet of math.

  All that day, I hugged myself. (Not literally, of course.) I had knowledge that nobody else had. I could have gone up to Alan like a fortune-teller with a crystal ball, and said, You will hear from Icarus tomorrow! But I wouldn’t have had time to say what he’d hear, before Alan screwed my head off.

  So I did the pencil and paper thing, down in Don’s shed. I drew a line down the middle of the piece of paper and wrote “TIME” on one side and “PLACE” on the other, these being the two bits of information Bogsy hadn’t yet revealed. Which side of the line would sunset go?

  I know the answer seems obvious, but I’d jumped to so many obvious conclusions since the Icarus thing began—and gotten them wrong. I didn’t want to get caught out this time. Plus, I was reading a book at school called Sunset Is a Place. In the book, Sunset House was the name of an old people’s home. It was all a bit sad; one of the nicest old people died. That’s what sunset made you think of: endings. “The Laurels” was a much better name.

  Under PLACE on my bit of paper I wrote “Sunset Boulevard,” which I’d heard of, and also “Sunrise Court,” which is part of the Sancton estate, down the road. If only it had been Sunset Court! Although, actually, I agreed with whoever had named it. Sunrise, being the start of the day, sounded hopeful. Sunset Court would have been a big downer, like Sunset House in the book.

  After that, I couldn’t think of any more places, and even the two I’d got were no good: Sunset Boulevard was in America and Sunrise Court didn’t count. So I wrote “Sunset (Icarus)” on the other side of the line.

  Timmy got invitations from his friends that said, “Please come to my party on Feb 19th at 2:15.” Parties were nice and 2:15 a reasonable time to have one.

  But “Please come to watch me fly on Nov 2nd at sunset”?

  That was weird. However you looked at it, even if you kept an open mind. I tried to keep mine open, but still it seemed wrong.

  Things that flew didn’t fly at sunset; at sunset they settled down for the night with their heads tucked under their wings. Icarus himself, in the story, had flown when the sun was high in the sky. At sunset, it wasn’t just the sun that went down: So did everything else.

  Everything? Birds (and boys) weren’t the only things that flew. Soon it would be Halloween. Bats, witches, vampires flew, too—and they flew at night. They rose up when the sun went down. I imagined Bogsy lying on his back in that big chest freezer, like Dracula lying in his coffin. When darkness fell, the lid would creak open …

  But that was stupid and only someone like Timmy would think like that. Someone like me knew that all you would find in a freezer was ice cream.

  And then I remembered the upturned plug. At the time, I’d felt only annoyance with Bogsy, for leaving it there on the floor. Now, suddenly, it seemed very important.

  There couldn’t be any ice cream in Bogsy’s freezer.

  Bogsy’s freezer wasn’t plugged in.

  So what was inside?

  Not Bogsy: He went to school every day. Maybe nothing. The freezer was probably empty and just being stored in the shed because there was nowhere else it could go.

  Probably.

  But I had to make sure.

  Of course the pile of sunset notes had gone. They’d be on their way to school, hidden deep in Bogsy’s bag. But, the next morning, everything else in Bogsy’s shed looked the same. The same jumble of things was on top of the freezer: I’d have to move it all—carefully—before I could do what I’d come to do. And to put off doing that (because I felt nervous) I paused by the spy tube and looked through.

  No Don—or Donald—today. The view I got was of part of the window, exactly the view I’d expected to get when I looked through before. The cobweb wasn’t in the picture, though I knew it was there; just the dusty glass and daylight beyond. It seemed very homely on that side and suddenly very unsafe on this.

  I moved to the freezer and picked up a slimy, brown apple core by its stalk. I put it on the floor beside another, more dried up, in a nest of crumpled old chewing gum wrappers. I put orange peels, two felt-tip pens, a key, a notebook (empty), some tape, and a lot of paint rags beside it. There was even a hiker’s rucksack, removed from its frame. I put everything on the floor, except the chewing gum wrappers, which I stuffed in my pockets: I needed to keep them separate from the ones on the floor already, so I’d be able to put exactly the right amount back.

  At last the surface was clear and I grasped the handle on the lid.

  I’d been over so many things in my mind: what might happen, what I might find, when I lifted the lid. But I hadn’t thought of this. That the lid wouldn’t lift. That no matter how much I pulled and shook and wiggled, it would not budge. But it wouldn’t. And, in a funny way, I was relieved. I’d put everything back and catch the B17 and get given my sunset note, like everyone else. I’d still know—unlike everyone else—who Icarus was. So it wasn’t all bad.

  Still, it was a shame. I checked the handle. There was no release button, no catch that I’d missed. I ran my eye all round the seal—and there it was. Someone had screwed on a padlock fastening and then put a padlock on.

  I bent to pick up the things from the floor that I’d have to put back. The apple core, the orange peels, the tape, the pens. The first things I got hold of were the notebook and the key.

  Not the key, of course, not the one for the padlock. That would be mad. No one would put on a padlock and then leave the key just lying around. I paused, with the key in my hand. I knew someone who might.

  Breathing fast, I tried it in the lock.

  Not just someone who might. Someone who had.

  The clasp of the padlock sprang open and the lock plopped into my palm. I let it drop to the floor and took hold of the handle again and pulled upward. And lifted the lid.

  BANG!

  I smashed the lid down again. Almost before I had seen inside. But I had seen. More than enough. I was shaking. Bogsy was mad. I refitted the padlock, quick.

  Bogsy was mad to be keeping something like that shut up in there. I was mad to be getting anywhere near it. What was he doing? And, poking about in his business, what was I?

  I’d better go to school and forget all about it.

  But I knew I couldn’t. Nobody could. Not after having caught sight of something like that.

  I checked the padlock, to make sure I’d snapped it shut. The lid could burst open! But no, the lock was secure. It couldn’t. Not even something like that could break out, no matter how much it thrashed about. And that’s what it would be doing: thrashing about in terrible anger. Nothing less.

  Because, imprisoned in Bogsy’s freezer, there was a gigantic bird.

  People say swans can break a man’s arm. This bird was ten times the size of a swan! What if it had flown up in my face? What if it was an eagle or something, with talons? The plumage was rich and dark. But all I’d glimpsed was a wing.

  The freezer stood silent again, keeping its secret. Hard to believe I’d seen what I’d seen.

  But what had I seen? No actual thrashing about, no movement at all. Could the bird be dead? But no, there’d been no smell of death about it. (If anything, I realized, it had smelled ever so slightly of spearmint!) The feathers had gleamed, the grays, browns, and blacks blending smoothly into one another, with the sleekness of health.

  And yet perhaps not.

  Here and there, there’d been a thinness. A bareness, like part of an old threadbare rug. Some of the quills of the feathers were showing in places. Maybe the bird was ill.

  And now I was turning the key in the padlock again. I wasn’t afraid anymore. Softly, softly, I lifted the lid, and this time pushed it right up so it came to rest against the shed wall, amid Bogsy’s suns.

  The wing hadn’t moved. And that’s what it was, I realized now: not a bird, but a wing on its own. The wing of a bird, but not torn from a bird: made, put together, by someone.

  When God made the world, peopl
e probably said to each other, How did he do it? As I gazed into Bogsy’s freezer, all I could think was, He did this? Could the person who’d made all the mess and disorder around me also have made something stunningly neat? Yes, they could. Those shimmering suns on the wall should have told me: Bogsy was brilliant. He was an artist. This was his work.

  When I was in Year 1 or Year 2, we’d all made old-fashioned dusters for a project called History of Home. Mrs. Hill’s husband worked on a farm, and she brought in loads of brown and black feathers. We each got a short length of bamboo cane and Mrs. Hill showed us how to bind feathers round one end, with a piece of string. Auntie Jen sent me some of Squawky’s, so mine had flashes of green, as well. It was ace. I brought it home at the end of term: That’s when Dad had his first allergic reaction.

  Maybe Bogsy knew someone who worked on that farm. But if so, he hadn’t been satisfied. He’d gone out and gotten himself jays’ feathers, doves’ feathers, magpies’ and starlings’, too; down the leading edge of his wing, he’d even put swans’ feathers—great curved white blades.

  I felt like the man who first looked into Tutankhamen’s tomb. When they asked him what he could see, all he managed to say was “Wonderful things.” The thing in the freezer was wonderful, too. I can’t put it into any more words than that.

  But it wasn’t complete. There were those bare patches.

  What if Bogsy had run out of feathers? Run out before even starting wing number two? He must be making a pair, though I couldn’t see anything underneath this one, and didn’t dare lift it. What a shame if such an amazing project should fail for a stupid reason like that.

  And that’s when I had the idea. I thought it would make all the difference to Bogsy. (How could I know it would make all the difference to me?) Straightaway, I was charging out of the shed, back through the garbage cans, back up our garden; upstairs and into my bedroom—pushing my chair up against the wardrobe so I could reach the top, where Mum shoved the things she wasn’t allowed to throw out. (I could hear her now, with the radio on, preparing the room next door. She was folding up the sofa bed. I knew because she suddenly swore: The hinge had caught her finger.)